Letter

I’m a collector of stuff that most folks ignore/You know that one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor/I’ve got gadgets and junk up to my knees/But it’s just like finding buried treasure to me…

These first few lines from “White Elephant” play in the background of my mind like a theme song almost every time I go into Steve’s garage. Looking around the old horse stable piled high with things he’s brought here because he thought they had value makes me wonder about what I consider valuable.

The only things I spend money on regularly are books and records. I like buying things made by people I know. But afterwards, when I’ve brought the thing home, more often than not, I’m left with a hollow feeling. The wanting beforehand is much stronger than whatever the feeling is after I’ve gotten it. Of course if it turns out the book or record is good, that extends the positive association while looking at the physical object which is like a vessel for thoughts and insights inside. A painting is different in that the package it’s in is the important part. There’s nothing inside, it’s all on the surface. But I hardly ever collect paintings either.

A couple months ago I bought one of Ken Ellis’s quilt portraits. I don’t know what came over me but I suddenly wanted one. Mine is of Shockheaded Peter from the old German children’s book. It’s the first piece of art I’ve paid for in at least a decade.

Every cardboard box, plastic bag, sagging suitcase, and bowed metal shelf in the garage holds something Steve loved when he first saw it. What happened after, when he put it back here, is another story. Whether most of these objects are forgotten after decades of lying in this place or are just biding their time for when he looks at them again and remembers why they caught his eye remains to be seen.

Because nothing here belongs to me, the way I see it is completely different. But there’s no way not to see this room as a manifestation of a man’s mind. In the paintings and drawings I’ve done I try to find some order, rhythm, pattern, and pathways through and around all of Steve’s stuff. Just as with all my other work I don’t think about meaning or narrative or content before starting but instead trust that something will catch in the process of doing the thing.

When I’m done I bring the piece back home and hang it on the wall to look at. It always looks completely different here than it did there. Then I sit and wonder whether I’d miss all my stuff if, say, I came home and the building burned down. I doubt I would. I’d know that the money I’d spent on those things had already helped the people I gave it to to make more things and that keeping the thing was always going to be temporary anyway. The buried treasure/scavenger hunt part of collecting has its appeal. But finding and keeping are very different from each other.

Painting pictures of someone else’s treasures has been its own reward. I don’t know what I’ll be left with after I’m done but I’m certainly glad I’ve done it.

My living room has old-fashioned wallpaper. It reminds me of the walls of 19th century sitting rooms in proper homes as seen in Westerns or depicted in paintings of the time to evoke stolid bourgeois life. Up until a few months ago I only hung work in progress over this wallpaper, but then it occurred to me that seeing as I’ve lived here almost two years and had no plans of moving, I may as well decorate. 

A crown molding shelf runs two-thirds of the way up the walls around the whole room. It’s just the right size for books with interesting covers, discarded art from reused thrift-store frames and mementos of every kind. When put up against the brown and mustardy-beige paper, each object is surrounded; the ceaseless pattern cushions and complements some objects, while overwhelming others. Like the paintings of my bookshelves which I’ve been doing for twenty years now, these new pictures aren’t exactly traditional still-lifes in that I didn’t set up or compose each element before committing it all to canvas or paper. They are just vignettes of the view I live with every day.

The Trick Dog is a replica of an old cast-iron toy which my friend Hannah gave me for Christmas. You put a coin in the little black dog’s mouth, push a button, and the dog springs forward and deposits the coin in the barrel. The orange clown used to hold a hoop which stopped the dog’s flight at just the right moment; without it, coins only make it through the slot every now and then. Most ping off the edge of the barrel and roll away willy-nilly.

On Friday, one of the most shameful days in this country’s history during my lifetime, I chose not to follow the news. I went to see a biopic about Ray Kroc, a huckster who swindled two brothers out of an idea which they’d both put their whole lives into and built a billion dollar fast-food empire. The man was no hero and even the great Michael Keaton’s portrayal couldn’t rid him of his conman’s stench. I went for drinks at the Rainbo and heard people I’ve known for decades speculate hopefully about the Vegas odds which favored our newly-sworn-in president’s impeachment within the year. I capped the evening with a play about the recently-retired newsman and presidential debate moderator Jim Lehrer having an identity crisis and wrestling with another version of himself.

None of these diversions were diversion enough of course. The only path through that I can see is to keep going deeper into my immediate world. Make the rooms I live in more habitable and render versions of them in paint as a way of connecting with the world outside my door. Whether doing this will help get our own orange clown to hold up the hoop and help the dog drop coins in the slot remains to be seen.

My wife left me and all I got was this crappy website. Thirteen and a half years ago, after she married me and showed me how to turn on a computer for the first time ever, my ex-wife, Deborah, suggested I should make a website for my artwork. My gut reaction was to fight the idea with everything I had. After all, I had serious doubts about photography, so what the hell business did I have messing with the internet? But in the fall of 2003 I would do about anything Deborah asked and, after all, she was a computer programmer.

She hand-coded all the initial pages of the website and my brother, Boris, a photographer, helped me digitize the hundreds of slides I’d amassed over the nearly twenty years I’d been painting and drawing at that point. It was a tedious process and because I was the only one involved with no expertise in the endeavor, I felt a bit helpless as pages piled up and up and up. My main early contribution was the cut paper welcome page (above) and the very consequential decision to only use type- and handwritten text on the site.

At the beginning of 2004, we were more or less ready to launch our weird cut-and-pasted baby into cyberspace. The web-hosting company which initially provided it a home was run by an artist couple we met at Jinx Coffee. I traded them a large framed charcoal drawing called “The Battle for Space” in exchange for a year of hosting and some tech help.

The look of the site was part ransom note, part crummy collaged scrapbook. Everything was scanned in, then hotspots were added if links were required. This made every little update laborious. A month or so after the site went live Deborah decided she didn’t wanna live with me anymore. She left town and the website became part of my coping therapy/self-torment. I’d get home from driving cab fourteen hours and wrestle with html for a few more before drifting to sleep. I wrecked the site repeatedly and cursed the entire world until eventually finding the missing comma or parenthesis without which the site apparently couldn’t function. If nothing else, this work scratched an itch I had heretofore been unaware I possessed. Dealing with the inner workings of a website is not unlike dealing with an autistic child in that neither can tolerate an iota of deviation from previously established rules. It is completely unintuitive and pedantic and thus totally unlike art-making as I’d always known it.

Then, after many weeks of frustration and banging my head against the wall, I began to actually figure out how to keep the thing running. This gave me some satisfaction, so then I decided to see what other people on the internet were doing to further their art careers. I joined every art site which sprang up and disappeared just as quickly, all the while tweaking my own in little and not so little ways. I signed up for MySpace mostly for self-promotion but wound up actually making some friends. Every social network after that first one was diminishing returns as I look back on it now.

The internet kept getting faster and faster and more ephemeral with every new iteration. But my website remained slow and simple. I spent a couple weeks trying to figure out CSS before giving up and deciding to be satisfied with occasional cosmetic changes. I have no interest in making it ‘optimized’ for mobile phones, nor in adding the myriad annoying features which plague so many websites these days. I tried for awhile to make the thing a money-making entity but the aesthetic and ethical compromises necessary were several lines in the sand over the point I was willing to go.

So thirteen years after it was born, I’m satisfied with my website being an archive for my thirty-plus years of making art in the same way a shitty thrift-store photo album is adequate to store old memories. It’s like the rusting classic car under a musty tarp in the back of the garage; it runs more or less, but you wouldn’t use it to earn a living, much less win any races. Does anyone even use websites anymore? Seems like online most things start to be forgotten before they’ve even registered in our conscience. In the end I’m still just a dumb painter, so dabbling with this technology will always feel somewhat suspect. But I’ve put in so much time and effort into the thing that killing it now would hurt too much.

Deborah and I are friends again. It took about ten years for that to happen. Since the website was created when we were together, whenever I work on it I’m reminded of that time. I have no idea if anyone gets much out of it but me at this point but see no reason to stop. It keeps me off the street, as my father’s fond of saying.